Berzerk: Recharged

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Atari Recharged: Volume Two, along with Yars: Recharged, Gravitar: Recharged, Caverns of Mars: Recharged, and Missile Command: Recharged.)

Berzerk is a 2-Stick Shooter released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Much as with the other games in the “Recharged” series, this is a re-imagining of an Atari classic, in this case Berzerk, a 1980 Top-Down Action game that wasn’t actually originally developed or published by Atari (it was released by Stern Electronics, and undoubtedly their most popular game). Its major claim to fame was being one of the first videogames with digitized voice clips, with the game’s robotic enemies voiced with appropriate robotic-sounding voice clips saying things like “Intruder alert!”, or enticing passersby in the arcade to play by declaring “coin detected in pocket”.

Of course, over 40 years later, this technological marvel seems rather quaint by today’s standards, so the question naturally becomes whether e reimagining of the game can infuse this game with something special like this series has done with some other Atari classics. And the answer… is no.

Credit where it’s due, this game does the obvious smart thing and updates the controls to play like a 2-Stick Shooter, which makes the game instantly more playable, but beyond that there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on here. Go into a room, shoot all the robots while avoiding getting shot, don’t stay too long or a giant ball of insta-death will appear and chase you, then go to the next room and repeat. That’s pretty much it – this is a very repetitive game.

The visuals are decent enough, using neon-colored 2D visuals that look nice enough but these too become repetitive quickly, and these are backed by a forgettable techno-style synthesized soundtrack and joined by similar digitized voice clips like those that were in the original game, though in this game they’re oddly drowned out by the music.

I’m sorry to say that despite how groundbreaking the original Berzerk may have been, this re-imagining is anything but. Quite the opposite, Berzerk: Recharged is repetitive, boring, and wholly uninteresting. Skip this one and find another 2-Stick Shooter to play.

tl;dr – Berzerk: Recharged is a 2-Stick Shooter that re-imagines an arcade classic, but what it reimagines it to is repetitive and dull. You have much better options than this game.

Grade: C+

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